As finals come closer and closer, college students around the world, including myself, are doubting college right now. Finals is the worst time of year. The weeks leading up to finals are even worse than the finals themselves.

The weeks leading up to finals are when you realize how far behind you are and how much stuff you must do in the period of about two to three weeks. It seems impossible. As a student, your anxiety goes up, along with your procrastination. You think your procrastination would get better throughout the years at college but this is my last year and it has progressively gotten worse. When I accomplish one thing, I am proud of myself.

However, it isn’t just procrastination because there are many other factors that interrupt your college life and that is life in general. Working, family and friend drama and illness all affect your college experience. Those things are a major part of life and they are all important.

As a person, you have to work to pay for rent, bills, groceries and other things. So, you must work. Family is the most important thing in my life; if someone gets sick or passes away, I am going to be there for the family. Friends are also extremely important to me, if one of them needs me, I am going to be there for them. I have a chronic illness and if I have a flare-up I can’t do anything. I either end up in my bed all day or in the emergency room. I have four ER visits under my belt in about a year.

All of those things are what make you procrastinate on reading, writing a paper, attending class, and taking an exam. They interrupt college. Most of the time there is nothing you can do and it sucks. It makes college suck. It makes life hard and we all, well most of us, have to deal with that. But people never usually ask, “how is your family?” or “how are your friends?” or “how is your job?” People frequently ask, “how is college?” But since all of those things are all lumped into one thing and affects your college so greatly. You lie and say “fine, how are you?” Unless you are honest like me, you say, “it sucks, I hate it. Can’t wait for it to be over. How are you?”

I am not even saying that those are the questions I think people should ask but that is just usually what happens. Because people always, always ask “how are you?” They ask this to be polite. Most people don’t actually care. And since we are programmed to say, “fine” or “good.” That’s what we do. Then we move on with our lives because we don’t want to tell people, sometimes strangers the sob story we call life. Let’s just talk to those we know who care and keep saying “fine” to those we don’t want to open up to. That’s one of the reasons the world goes around.

Ultimately, life has its ups and downs and those ups and downs affect how we do in college. A lot of people don’t understand that. My GPA has fallen every semester since I have been going to college. So, yeah college is affected by our outside life. It sucks.